The ferocity engendered by the American campaign against the Indians, and by the defection of a large part of the black slave population to the British, was not the limit of the singular viciousness of the war in the south. Although most frontiersmen aligned with the American cause against the Indians, local land feuds often ensured that some of them joined the British. Similarly, many poorer settlers joined the patriots where the local squirearchy in the lands further east from the frontier was Tory. Land quarrels and score-settling became common as established order broke down. Nathanael Greene commented, ‘The animosity between the Whigs and the Tories renders their situation truly deplorable. Some thousand have fallen in this way in this quarter [the south], and the evil rages with more violence than ever. If a stop can not be put to these massacres, the country will be depopulated in a few months more, as neither Whig nor Tory can live.’
Atrocities abounded, as did irregular bands of armed men professing allegiance to neither one side nor the other, who were no more than bandits and scavengers. A loyalist officer from South Carolina observed, ‘The whole province resembled a piece of patchwork, the inhabitants of every settlement when united in sentiment being in arms for the side they liked best and making continual inroads into one another’s settlements.’
A young American fighter wrote that there were three kinds of patriot:
Those who were determined to fight it out to the last let the consequences be what it might … those who would fight a little when the wind was favourable but as soon as it shifted to an unfavourable point would draw back and give up all for lost … those who were favourable for the cause, provided it prospered and they could enjoy the benefit but would not risk one hair of their heads to attain it.
This irregular warfare frequently deterred law-abiding loyalists from coming out in support of the British: the areas the King’s army really controlled were few, and its military sweeps were less of a threat to most people than the possibility of retaliation by a band of murderous backwoodsmen in the name of the republican cause. In this climate of fear, the American guerrillas were more pervasive and stronger than the British army.
A few examples will suffice. For the British, the brutal Major James Wemyss (known for his fondness for ‘hanging and burning’) had Adam Cusack hanged as a parole-breaker on a roadside gibbet in front of his wife and children. The vicious and obese rebel Benjamin Cleveland had one Tory hanged and, as he kicked, told another that he would suffer the same fate unless he cut his own ears off and left the country for ever. The Tory promptly called for a knife ‘which he whetted for a moment on a brick, then gritting his teeth, he slashed off his own ears and left with the blood streaming down his cheeks, and was never heard of afterwards’.
Just after Christmas 1780, the ruthless American cavalry commander William Washington (George’s distant relation) slaughtered 150 Tories and captured 40 without the loss of a single man. One eyewitness wrote:
Here I must relate an incident which occurred on this occasion. In Washington’s corps there was a boy of fourteen or fifteen, a mere lad, who in crossing the Tiger River was ducked by a blunder of his horse. The men laughed and jeered at him very much at which he got mad and swore that, boy or no boy, he would kill a man that day or die. He accomplished the former. I remember very well being highly amused at the little fellow chasing around a crib after a Tory, cutting and slashing away with his puny arm, until he brought him down.
Against this, the Tory Levi Smith recounts a story to the credit of General Francis Marion, an elusive guerrilla leader operating in the swamps near Charleston:
I had nearly taken farewell of this world … when I perceived Gen Marion on horseback with his sword drawn. He asked in a passion what they were doing there. The soldiers answered, ‘We are hanging them people, sir.’ He then asked them who ordered them to hang any person. They replied, ‘Col. Lee.’ Whereupon the little Swamp Fox took over. ‘I will let you know, damn you, that I command here and not Col. Lee. Do you know if you hang this man Lord Rawdon will hang a good man in his place, that he will hang Sam Cooper who is to be exchanged for him?’
Whatever the wishes of the majority of the population, the expected surge of loyalist support to the British was confined to the few areas they already controlled, and even there most loyalists refused to fight for the cause.
The new British commander in the south, Lord Cornwallis, was an able aristocrat, imbued with a readiness to seize the offensive and a vigour wanting in both Clinton and Howe. Born the son of the fifth Baron Cornwallis and the niece of Sir Robert Walpole, Britain’s first prime minister, he went to Eton and a military academy in Turin before taking part in the Seven Years War. Although an opponent of Britain’s policy in America, he became an aide to the King. Following the death of his young wife, he was heartbroken, as well as embittered at being passed over as commander-in-chief in America when Clinton attempted to resign. He never forgave his superior when he resumed command.
In spite of the recent victory at Camden, at which Gates had been soundly defeated, in the autumn of 1780 Cornwallis was left with only one possible strategy for success: to attempt what General Howe had failed to do in the north and pursue an outright victory over the enemy. The alternative was to remain bottled up in the major towns and ports the British controlled – in particular Charleston and Savannah – and wait for the Americans to come to them. But now that the French had entered the war, there was a real danger even to this minimalist strategy – of concentrated French naval strength accompanied by an American land attack. As long as the British pursued the southern strategy, the only sensible course for Cornwallis must have seemed to be to run down the enemy.
Besides, Cornwallis was a much less defensive strategist than either Howe or Clinton, although not nearly so flash or aggressive as Burgoyne. Also, after the Battle of Camden, it seemed that the British were routing American opposition in the south. So the curtain was lifted on the last great act in the American War of Independence: the chase between the armies across the great expanse of the southern states.
The Americans, meanwhile, had also acquired a new leader in the south, who was to prove the best commander in the war after Washington, and possibly exceeded him. He was thirty-eight-year-old Nathanael Greene, who had spent two years as Quartermaster General and, through energy and intelligence, had revolutionized the clothing and feeding of Washington’s army. Greene’s latest assignment had been to take over as commander at West Point after Arnold’s defection, but in October 1780, as he complained to his wife, ‘I am ordered away to another quarter. How unfriendly is war to domestic happiness.’
A Quaker, born the son of a former forgemaster and merchant from Rhode Island, Greene married a beautiful girl from a prominent local family, Caty Littlefield. Promoted to run the local militia, he immediately impressed Washington – but his advice to make a stand at Fort Washington in 1776, after the fall of New York, had proved disastrous, and Washington, who shared the responsibility, had made him the scapegoat.
A blunt, self-educated, no-nonsense man with a hard puritan streak, Greene was also highly intelligent, and his experience as Quartermaster General had taught him the importance of good provisioning to motivate his men. He liked to be meticulously well-prepared, scouting out territory before entering it, and methodically noting the location of fords across rivers – usually above waterfalls – and whether southern rivers like the Pee Dee could suddenly rise twenty or thirty feet after rains, thus blocking an army or permitting it to escape. He was to die in debt, prematurely, at the age of forty-four – a tragic end for the greatest of Washington’s generals.
After a long string of incompetent or disastrous American generals – Charles Lee, Benjamin Lincoln, Horatio Gates – Greene was an inspired choice, the right man in the right place. As Colonel Moultrie, the great American defender of Charleston, wrote, ‘His military abilities, his active spirit, his great resources when reduced to difficulties in the field, his having been quarter-master-general to the army under the commander-in-chief; all these qualities combined together rendered him a proper officer to collect and to organize an army that was broken up and dispersed.’
Cornwallis was wary of his new opponent: ‘Greene is as dangerous as Washington. He is vigilant, enterprising, and full of resources – there is but little hope of gaining any advantage over him. I never feel secure when encamped in his neighbourhood.’
Greene had few illusions about the quality of the army he had been called upon to command: it was a shambles, and the only tactic he could conceive for it was hit-and-run attacks against the British. To be caught in an open engagement with the enemy would, he believed, be fatal. To run, he needed to be sure of his line of escape. He called this the ‘fugitive war’.
When Greene reached the American army at Hillsboro, North Carolina, on 27 November 1780, he found some 1,400 ‘naked and dispirited’ troops. They were almost all militia of the most undisciplined kind, whose appetite for plunder he compared to ‘the locusts of Egypt’ which have ‘eaten up every green thing’. Greene’s first act was to order his second-in-command, the able General von Steuben, to supply the army properly. To cope with the innumerable watercourses of the south, he constructed his own shallow rafts, which he had mounted on wheels to provide a crucial element of mobility.
The fastidious Greene was appalled by the ‘savage’ civil war raging between Whigs and Tories in North and South Carolina, and found the Whigs themselves divided into three competing factions. He was determined to bring the partisan leaders from the south under control. He told Thomas Sumter:
The salvation of this country don’t depend upon little strokes; nor should this great business of establishing a permanent army be neglected to pursue them. Partisan strokes in war are like the garnish of a table, they give splendour to the army and reputation to the officers, but they afford no substantial national security. They are matters which should not be neglected, and yet they should not be pursued to the prejudice of more important concerns. You may strike a hundred strokes, and reap little benefit from them unless you have a good army to take advantage of your success. The enemy will never relinquish their plan, nor the people be firm in our favour until they behold a better barrier in the field than a volunteer militia who are one day out and the next at home.
It was about as unpromising a command as seemed possible, particularly after the disaster at Camden. But even in that dismal autumn a rare event had occurred to lift rebel spirits during this long war – a victory by America. It had happened almost by accident, had been achieved by the kind of irregular forces Greene most despised, and had largely been brought about through overconfident blundering by a British commander. Yet Thomas Jefferson, now governor of Virginia, was to hail it as ‘that glorious victory which was the joyful annunciation of that turn in the tide of success which terminated the revolutionary war’.
In fact, at the time it was an isolated and freak success. But it perfectly illustrated two enduring lessons of the war: that, even if the British won every battle, they could not necessarily win the war while enemy forces remained at large on that huge continent; and that one American victory after a string of British triumphs was enough to threaten the mother country with overall defeat. The British could not afford to lose a single battle, for fear of demoralizing the government and public opinion back home. So far, in the south, they had not done so. Now they were to endure a stinging little defeat in what has become known as the Battle of King’s Mountain.
For once a loyalist force had been placed under a Scottish commander, of dash, daring and not a little foolhardiness. His name was Patrick Ferguson, and he was the inventor of the first breech-loading rifle (which, characteristically, the British were not to adopt for 100 years more). As commander of the loyalist militia, he had been given free rein to engage in mopping-up operations against the patriot guerrillas of north-western South Carolina, up against the mountains.
Ferguson’s courage and sensitivity quickly won the respect of the cussed loyalists, and through the summer of 1780 he had worked with gusto and success with a few hundred men, cleansing the area of patriot forces who, by a quirk of local politics, were commanded by the local gentry families – men like John Sevier, later first governor of Tennessee, William Campbell, a Virginia aristocrat, and Isaac Shelby, later governor of Kentucky. These men had been forced by Ferguson’s offensive to retreat across the Blue Ridge Mountains, where they formed a motley but colourful army of some 850 men, their horses decked out in red and yellow, the men wearing blue hunting shirts. Reaching Gilberton in the foothills, Ferguson cockily issued a challenge that ‘if they did not desist from their opposition to British arms, he would march his army over the mountains, hang their leaders, and lay their country waste with fire and sword’.
On 26 September the ‘over-mountain men’, advancing from the Watauga river to Gilberton, moved to challenge Ferguson’s force of around 150 British regular troops and 900 or so loyalists directly. Ferguson prudently began to withdraw towards Cornwallis’s army in Charleston, then thought better of it and decided to make a stand. His men climbed a spur, grandly called King’s Mountain, some sixty feet above the surrounding ground extending from the mountain range that separates North and South Carolina. Its craggy summit afforded them a good defensive position, but it was not steep and its slopes were covered with deep pine forests, which provided perfect cover for any attack. Here Ferguson wrote to Cornwallis, ‘I have taken a post where I do not think I can be forced.’ It was an appalling misjudgement.
Ferguson did not know that the over-mountain men had picked up recruits as they approached, swelling their army to 1,400. The rebels reached King’s Mountain on the afternoon of 7 October, surrounding it, and forcing the British to gather at one end of the ridge in order to prevent their force being cut in two. That enabled the Americans to climb up on to the abandoned end of the ridge.
Meanwhile the rest of the encircling forces climbed through the dense woods in irregular formations, using their long rifles to pick off the British, for whom the rocks at the top in practice afforded little shelter. Instead the dense trees gave the Americans virtually complete cover. The forest, as a loyalist officer put it, ‘sheltered the [patriots] and enabled them to fight in their favourite manner. In fact, after driving in our pickets, they were able to advance … to the crest … in perfect safety, until they took post and opened an irregular but destructive fire.’
The disciplined ranks of Ferguson’s trained loyalists, staging bayonet charges and firing off volleys that went over the Americans’ heads because of the elevation, proved no match for their largely unseen enemy, although for a time they kept away those closing in along the ridge. One young British loyalist described the terrifying scene afterwards, as reported by another:
As the mountaineers passed over him he would play possum; but he could plainly observe their faces and eyes; and to him those bold, brave riflemen appeared like so many devils from the infernal regions, so full of excitement were they as they darted like enraged lions up the mountain. He said they were the most powerful looking men he ever beheld; not over-burdened with fat, but tall, raw-boned, and sinewy, with long matted hair – such men as were never before seen in the Carolinas.
The Americans staged two assaults, then broke through on the third, as Ferguson himself, in magnificent style, mounted a white charger and, whistling his men into action, staged one last sortie. He was shot from his saddle by a murderous crossfire.
With that the British surrendered, but many continued to be killed, and prisoners were knifed in retaliation for Tarleton’s massacre at Waxhaw. Besides, the Americans considered loyalists little more than traitors. Altogether 225 British were killed and 185 wounded, while 700 prisoners were taken. The Americans suffered 90 casualties. As James Collins, a young American soldier, described it:
The dead lay in heaps on all sides, while the groans of the wounded were heard in every direction. I could not help turning away from the scene before me with horror, and, though exulting in victory, could not refrain from shedding tears … On examining the dead body of their great chief [Ferguson], it appeared that almost fifty rifles must have been levelled at him at the same time. Seven rifle balls had passed through his body, both of his arms were broken, and his hat and clothing were literally shot to pieces.
In the grisly aftermath, nine men were hanged, three of them loyalist officers – one accused of whipping a boy for refusing to feed his horses. Captain Patrick Carr of Georgia exclaimed, ‘Would to God every tree in the wilderness have such fruit as that.’ Many of the wounded died during the next few days through ill-treatment by the rebels, while the area became infested with wolves eating the partially buried dead. The 700 prisoners were marched northward, many dying on the way, ‘cast down and trodden to death in the mire’. More than 100 escaped. It was a characteristically savage southern end to the worst British defeat since Saratoga.
Cornwallis was already beginning to fret at the small numbers of loyalists joining up with the British; and both the defeat and the butchery – probably intentionally – served as major new deterrents to potential recruits. The Battle of King’s Mountain greatly boosted the flagging American cause, and increased Cornwallis’s growing isolation in the south.
After his victory at Camden, on 8 September he had started moving slowly to Charlotte, many of his men suffering sickness in the southern heat and harrassed by irregulars along the way. After learning of the defeat at King’s Mountain in October, he decided not to proceed to his original destination of Hillsboro, where he hoped to seize the main American arsenal, but withdrew tactically to Winnsboro in South Carolina by the end of October, after a gruelling march.
By this time further bad news had arrived: Thomas Sumter, the cold, ruthless, stubborn and psychotic ‘Carolina gamecock’, and his band of irregulars had staged two successful hit-and-run attacks against Major James Wemyss and a force of 200 on the Broad river, and against the capable Tarleton at Tyger river. Meanwhile to the east the tiny, swarthy, bow-legged Francis Marion, a guerrilla leader of humanity, genius and extraordinary mobility, virtually cut British lines of communication with Charleston. Tarleton tried to run him down, but gave up after the ‘Swamp Fox’s’ forces disappeared into first the Pocotaligo swamp and then the Ox swamp. ‘As to this damn old fox, the devil himself could not catch him,’ commented Tarleton.
All this was demoralizing for Cornwallis. But he resolved to go on the offensive as soon as possible and strike back into North Carolina. He watched in satisfaction as the new American commander, Greene, performed a classic military mistake by dividing his troops into two – one force under Daniel Morgan, the effective and thoughtful veteran of Bemis Heights and Saratoga, to strike west into the border country, the remainder to cut south from Charlotte to Cheraw on the Pee Dee.
This made it much easier for Cornwallis to attack Greene’s own reduced army; Tarleton’s force, on the British left, could cope with Morgan. Tarleton pleaded with Cornwallis to merge both British forces to trap Morgan’s contingent. But the British commander was certain of the superiority of British fighters, and anyway those under Tarleton alone outnumbered Morgan’s force. On 13 January 1781 Greene wrote to Morgan, ‘Colonel Tarleton is said to be on his way to pay you a visit. I doubt not that he will have a decent reception and proper dismission.’ Morgan, just seven miles from fording the Broad river, decided to make a stand at Hannah’s Cowpens, a stockyard, because with his heavy wagons he was certain to be overtaken by Tarleton’s force.
The place could hardly have seemed a less appropriate choice. With their back to the river, Morgan’s army had no escape route – something he had calculated as stiffening the resolve of his troops. The site was a wide meadow with two small hills and very little protective foliage – a disadvantage for the Americans, who preferred to fight from cover, while suiting the British, who had more cavalry, which could quickly cover the ground. Its sole attraction for the Americans was the hills.
Morgan drew up his main force of some 450 regular soldiers on the biggest of these two gentle humps. In front of them he placed around 200 militia, whom he instructed to fire two volleys and then withdraw – knowing they would probably disintegrate anyway under British attack. Some 150 riflemen crouched behind whatever cover they could find, while Morgan’s small contingent of 125 cavalry waited behind the second, smaller, hill as a reserve. What followed was probably the war’s most skilfully executed display of American generalship, imaginatively conceived and perfectly carried out, in which the gruff veteran Morgan, who had been with Arnold on the famous trek across the wastes of Maine in August 1775, displayed all the wisdom endowed by experience.
Tarleton, overconfident, decided to attack at first light on 17 January, to surprise the enemy with his slightly larger force of 1,100 men. Conventionally, he placed his infantry between two wings of 150 cavalry, leaving 200 more cavalry and a Highland regiment in reserve.
The British trotted steadily, unwaveringly, towards the line of American militia. Rebel sharpshooters as effectively as ever picked off British soldiers. The militia, as ordered, fired just twice, then pulled away to the left to escape around the back of the first hill.
Assuming the American line to be disintegrating, the British charged forward and caught many of the militia before they could get around the hill. But Morgan’s small contingent of cavalry galloped to their aid, forcing the now outnumbered British cavalry to retreat. Meanwhile the British infantry marched steadily up the hill, only to find that the troops there, far from running away, were well-positioned regulars firing down upon them.
The now disorganized British lines had entered a trap. Tarleton, realizing this, ordered forward his reserve, which threatened to outflank the American right. Spotting them, the American officer ordered his men to wheel, but they panicked and began to retreat over the brow of the hill.
There Morgan, with great coolness, ordered them to stop and make a stand. The British, expecting a rout for the second time that day, charged up to the crest of the hill, believing the battle won – to be faced by an orderly line of Americans opening fire with deadly effectiveness just below them.
It was the British soldiers’ turn to panic and run, as they were out of formation. Meanwhile the militia, reaching the back of the hill in relatively good order, now emerged from around it to cut off the British retreat, as did the small American cavalry for the second time. Within moments the tide of that fast-shifting battle had turned again, and the British were outnumbered: some 800 were taken prisoner, with 100 dead and 200 wounded. The Americans losses were just 12 killed and 60 wounded. Tarleton, who fought to the end with ferocious determination and nearly killed the American cavalry commander, Colonel William Washington, escaped with forty of his horsemen.
It had been an unprecedented defeat for the British. The redcoats had been beaten in conventional battle upon open ground – outmanoeuvred, outgeneralled, outfought – and they were even the less disciplined of the two forces.
Although not decisive, the defeat at Cowpens was a staggering rebuff to Cornwallis. He had been even more to blame than Tarleton for overconfidence – had he taken advantage of the divided American troops to concentrate his forces against Morgan’s, the British would surely have won. Anticipating the British commander’s fury, Morgan waited only two hours before moving his men as fast as possible to safety across the Broad river to the west, and then to the Catawba, before allowing them to rest.
There followed a Keystone Cops-style pursuit as the enraged Cornwallis set off after the offending Morgan with his main army – in the wrong direction from Winnsboro, through faulty intelligence. In order to move more rapidly across trails turned into quagmires by the incessant winter rain, Cornwallis abandoned his supplies – including the rum, which, to his men’s dismay, he poured away.
Meanwhile Nathanael Greene, who had learned of the victory at Cowpens from his position on the Pee Dee river at Cheraw, joined the chase in an effort to link up with Morgan and create a force outnumbering the pursuing British. Taking charge of a small advance guard, he left his main army to follow behind and set off to liaise with Morgan to the north-west, marching in parallel with Cornwallis’s army coming up from the south west.
The chase was on. It was vital to Cornwallis to reach Morgan before Greene could get to him with his main army – the British debacle at Cowpens had largely been caused by Cornwallis’s own failure to reinforce Tarleton and create an overwhelming military strength. Unlike Howe’s previous pursuit of Washington in New Jersey, this one was over a land criss-crossed with rivers, offering lethal opportunities for traps in the rain-sodden southern climate in late autumn.
The British skilfully crossed the swollen Catawba river, in spite of American attempts to stop them, encountering and killing General William Davidson of the South Carolina militia on the way. They now moved to the Yadkin, where they regrouped and the Americans ‘ran away’ – in fact managing to cross the river on boats hastily assembled by Tadeusz Kosciuszko with moments to spare.
Cornwallis now believed he had the Americans trapped against the Dan river. But boats were available thanks to Greene’s foresighted planning and ‘Light Horse’ Harry Lee’s skilful cavalry command. To Cornwallis’s astonishment, Morgan, to his north, then turned suddenly east to meet Greene’s army, which had followed slowly with its wagons and provisions behind its commander. The two divided American armies had met up at last. Cornwallis’s attempt to isolate Morgan’s army had failed.
Greene, newly confident, promptly decided that the joint American armies, which had met at Guilford Court House in early February 1781, should stand and fight. His fellow generals – in particular Morgan, who, despite his victory was weary and unwell – relentlessly opposed this, fearing overwhelming defeat. Greene was persuaded to send forward only a force of 700 of his best men to give the impression they would fight, while the rest crossed to safety across the Yadkin. This ruse worked brilliantly. Cornwallis pursued the force under Otho Williams, while the main American force recrossed the Yadkin further down and then the Dan. Williams himself managed to evade his pursuers and got across just in time.
An appalling massacre of Tories now ensued on 25 February 1781. Through deception, Henry Lee and the hardfaced Scots-Irish partisan leader Andrew Pickens approached a column of 400 loyalists under Colonel John Pyce: ninety were slaughtered while begging for mercy. Six prisoners were hacked to death, according to an American eyewitness. Greene declared coldly, ‘It has had a very happy affect on those disaffected persons, of which there are too many in this country.’